Before
After
"Eduardo helped take our market garden in Aljezur to the next level with his skill and care in implementing syntropic agroforestry and permaculture. He's the real deal."
Skeets Rapier, owner of the farm
The property
The farm is located on a 3 hectare property in Alfambras, Algarve, Portugal. The main challenges on this property are presented by:
- Strong winds all year round
- Extremely dry summers
- Since the property is in one of the lowest points of the region, risk of floods in winter time
- Very compacted clay soil
When I was commissioned this project, the farm had already been operating and the following systems had been implemented:
- Market gardening beds had been established on contour lines to maximise water absorption
- 6 orchard lines had been planted
- The soil had been amended with spent mushroom substrate from a local mushroom farm
Design goals
The main goals for this design were:
- To standardise the farm operations. The vegetable beds that were present where of different sizes and different soil quality all across the farm
- To transform the orchard lines into agroforestry lined by adding more trees
- To design more agroforestry lines to increase the tree density all across the farm
- To develop income streams for the farm
- To design a chicken system for the production of eggs and meat
Vegetable market garden
I created a standardised guideline for the farm operations which included re-sizing of the beds, organisation of planting schedules and assignment of clear tasks to the field team.
Vegetable beds have been designed to be 80 cms wide and approx. 20 meters long each. This has made it easier to organise the planting schedule and the operations of the nursery where seedlings are grown.
To standardise farm operations I have developed the following:
- A planting schedule to know when to plant what for both the nursery and the fields
- A harvesting schedule to know when to expect a harvest from which beds - and to then be able to organise deliveries and markets accordingly
- A seed organiser to know how many seeds need to be in the storage at all times
- With the support of my colleague Jack Hogdson, a detailed layout of how to plant crops on every bed
Hereunder is an example of one of the planting schedules for the fields and a schematics of the planting layout.
Hereunder is an example of the schematics of the planting layouts. The same was handed for every bed and every crop.
Agroforestry
The pre-existing orchard lines presented a few challenges:
- Almost only fruit trees were planted, leaving a lot of exposed soil that kept drying out and becoming more and more compacted
- The tree beds were shaped into tall and large mounds, some of which reached over 2 meters in width. This left a lot of surface area exposed to the hot sun, thus increasing evaporation. Also, the huge amount of exposed soil increased weed pressure and made it very hard for young trees to establish themselves.
To meet these challenges, I designed - with the support of my colleague Giuseppe Sannicandro - an integrated strategy to:
- Quickly cover the exposed soil and create production while the trees established themselves
- Turn the almost-monoculture lines into layered and diverse agroforestry systems
The agroforestry lines have been designed following a syntropic-like approach - with very high planting density and high maintenance inputs through pruning and disturbance cycles.
The new agroforestry lines have been designed from scratch. This allowed me to use natural succession as a guiding method to establish the trees. Growing these lines with a proper strategy allowed the trees to reach better health and bigger dimensions then the other lines planted 2 years before!
Business
As part of my design work, I have also developed income streams for the farm. My work focused on:
- Establishing a network of over 400 people who come to buy food weekly
- Establishing a network with other regenerative producers that provided what the farm could not produce
- Establishing a weekly market on the farm
- Organising other weekly markets in the region
- Organising interviews and hiring new personnel to ran the market and other initiatives
Fazenda compadres has become a reference project for regenerative farming and clean organic food in the Algarve region. Many people now buy their food here, and many have come to visit the farm and learn how to implement systems like this themselves!
Do you want to know more about this project? Watch the two short films I made about it